Ending Poverty

Influential political philosopher Thomas Pogge argues for a new global institutional commitment to the swift and complete eradication of severe poverty.

RSA Keynote

Thomas Pogge has emerged as one of the world’s most influential and challenging political philosophers. At the RSA, Pogge will draw upon his experience with the campaigning group Academics Stand Against Poverty, to highlight the structural causes of the persistence of poverty.

Pogge argues that much of today's severe poverty constitutes a human rights violation committed through supranational rule design. The eradication of severe poverty requires mainstreaming the concern for the poor beyond the niche of development assistance.

In Pogge’s view, the first Millennium Development Goal - the aim to reduce the number of extremely poor and the number of chronically undernourished by 27 percent in the 1990-2015 period – was and is grotesquely under-ambitious and, in fact, these MDGs, not coupled with tasks or responsibilities of specific agents, were not genuine goals at all. What we need post-2015 is the commitment to eradicate severe poverty fast and completely, coupled with clear responsibilities assigned to specific competent actors to keep the effort on a clear path to delivery.

Speaker: Thomas Pogge, director of the global justice program and Leitner professor of philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University.

Chair: Rorden Wilkinson, professor of international political economy, University of Manchester.